The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream

By Sheryll Cashin

PublicAffairs, 391 pages, $26

All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education

By Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

Norton, 365 pages, $25.95

The 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down government-imposed racial segregation in public schools, should inspire widespread celebration. But especially among African-Americans, Brown's ostensible beneficiaries, the May 17 anniversary now elicits ambivalence rather than elation.

The contrast from 50 years ago could not be greater. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, the plaintiffs' lead lawyer, predicted that school segregation would fully vanish within five years and said he was "so happy I was numb." But Marshall's optimism dissipated rapidly. One year later the Supreme Court instructed the defendant school districts to implement desegregation "with all deliberate speed" and returned the five distinct cases that Brown comprised to the lower courts. There, the most influential order declared that Brown "does not require integration. It merely forbids discrimination" and "the use of government power to enforce segregation." Thirteen years passed before the Supreme Court explicitly repudiated that view and finally ordered large-scale desegregation of Southern schools that were almost as racially separate as in 1954.

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a great upsurge in pupil integration across the South. But in a subsequent series of decisions reaching from 1974 to 1996, involving Northern cities such as Detroit and St. Louis, the Supreme Court refused to order metropolitan-wide integration for major urban areas whose schools often remained as racially discrete as those challenged in Brown. By the mid-1990s, school desegregation cases were coming to an end both north and south.

That history largely explains the mixed feelings Brown evokes today. Blacks nowadays are "ambivalent integrationists" whose "frustration with the unmet promises of integration" has led many to adopt "a 'post-integrationist' mind-set," writes Sheryll Cashin in "The Failures of Integration," her superbly erudite and enormously thoughtful new book.

Cashin's belief that "there is some buyer's remorse in the civil rights community about integration" is more than borne out by Derrick Bell's provocatively sardonic "Silent Covenants." Bell was an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the 1960s in the South, but as early as the mid-1970s he publicly critiqued the unquestioning faith in integration that had guided his legal work. Revisiting those early and highly influential criticisms, Bell recalls regretfully that black parents "recognized long before their civil rights lawyers that the effort to racially balance the schools was not working."

Now, "having abandoned my integrationist idealism," Bell calls Brown "a serious disappointment" and a "failure." He observes that many other veteran activists likewise "came to see a singular focus on racial balance in public schools as actually counter-productive. Zealous faith in integration blinded us to the actual goal of equalizing educational opportunities for black children, and led us to pursue integration without regard to, and often despite, its ultimate impact on the well-being of students." With poignant remorse, Bell recounts how in 1961 several local activists in Mississippi beseeched him to help reopen a recently closed school. "Sadly unaware of the value of a black school in a small community, I told them that our crusade was not to save segregated schools but to eliminate them."

"Silent Covenants" examines Brown's post-1954 impact from a perspective readers may find either refreshingly realistic or cynically pessimistic. Declaring that "racism is permanent in this country," Bell explains that Brown should be seen as a decision that did more for white America's self-image than for black people. By portraying "state-supported racial segregation as an eminently fixable aberration," Bell writes, "the Brown Court foreclosed the possibility of recognizing racism as a broadly shared cultural condition."

Drawing upon the historical scholarship of Mary Dudziak, Bell contends that Brown "represented a convergence of black and the nation's interests" because the ruling greatly aided America's Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. "[T]he Supreme Court was motivated to decide Brown as it did because it agreed with the State Department that invalidating segregation in the public schools would benefit the nation's foreign policy," Bell states.